I play a lot of video games, but sometimes, it's more interesting to analyze what I see, and what I've missed. This is a working catalog of my gaming life.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Let's Make Up Achievements: Resident Evil 4 (Part 2)

One of the great things about Resident Evil 4 is the variety of different gameplay features buried within the core game. While most people remember RE4 for it's panic inducing over the shoulder shooter gameplay, the various boss fights and QTE sections actually changes up the ways players attack each section of the game. For me as a designer, highlighting these sections, and perhaps making players first look at those sections, and then suggesting that there are other ways to tackle the same problem would be a fantastic way of setting up achievements. It's interesting to note that outside of of the main game, the developers have ignored all the other modes that are ripe for coming up new achievements. Obviously there is other constraints that limits a developer, such as development time, and the cost of redoing things, but since I'm treating this as a strict design exercise, that isn't an issue.

Also as of note: I'm not going to be super creative with the names. While some of the most creative achievements are based on puns or other inspiration sources, some achievements are rather boiler plate and I rather not come up with them. Deal with it. :P

So how do we setup the categories? Joe had made a very interesting reply/observation in a previous post of mines, which identified 4 major category of achievements: Progression, Completion, Exploration, Skill. In addition to these groups, I also tend to add additional categories like "collection" and "multiplayer" if and when it's applicable. Let's start with those.

Progression

Surprisingly, in terms of progression, Capcom's list holds up pretty well in this regard, with fairly even checkpoints at the major intersections of the game:

It Begins With a Ring - (Complete first village)

Do Not Shoot the Water! - (Defeat the lake monster)

A Rock and a Hard Place - (Defeat El Gigante /or take alternate path)

Secure the Ballistics - (Rescue the president's daughter)

A Bloodline Severed - (Defeat the village chief in battle)

A Terrifying Assassin - (Turn the tables on Verdugo, the right hand of Salazar)

The Castellan Falls - (Defeat Salazar, and make your escape from the castle.)

The Ties That Bind - (Defeat Krauser, your former partner, in battle)

We're Going Home - (Defeat Saddler in battle, complete game)

The only concern about this list is that a)It might be too top heavy (First 5 are is for the village setting of the game, whereas each remaining settings only gets 2) and b)9 achievements maybe too many. We'll deal with that later.

Completion

With completion, we can address a few more things, most notably, the additional modes within the game.

Various mini games within RE4 that weren't covered.

For Assignment Ada and Separate Ways, let's just tack on a the boiler plate achievement for completing it. Since Separate Ways is considerably longer, let's also give a midway checkpoint

Complete Assignment Ada

Get Past El Gigante (which IIRC, right at the end of Ch 2)

Complete Separate Ways

The Mercenaries, on the other hand, offers a few more of potential completion based achievements.

Survive one round of Mercenries

Survive as all characters at least once

Survive all combinations of characters and stages

Additionally, one thing not included within the Progression set is some sort of marker for a hard difficulty run:

Complete game in Professional mode

Collection

Collection is a catch all for things that aren't exactly about completing a game, but other smaller features that helps give player feedback. While some people may think that this "type" of achievements are a bit self serving and over-obsessive, I personally don't think they're any different than games that hands out other rewards for completion of tasks. Let's go through a rundown of ideas that can better explain this:

With items:

Fully upgrade a gun

Purchased all guns - Owned all guns at least once

Upgrade the Attache Case (1/2/3 times)

Catch a Large Black Bass

Own all chicken egg at the same time (Brown/Normal/Gold/Rotten)

Medicine Man - Own all combinations of herb mixes at the same time

Treasure:

Own all Treasure Map (Main Campaign only)

Own a completed Elegant Mask

Own a Beerstein with the Cateyes

Own the Butterfly Map with Eyes

Own the Royal Insignia and Crown Jewel with Corwn

Own a Golden Lynx with 3 stones attached.

Have collected one of each treasure items

Collected 5 Ruby - By defeating the Dr. Salvador (Cainsaw guy)

Others:

Collect all memos

Collect all Yellow Herbs in the game

Fully upgrade Ashley's Health

Fully upgrade Leon's Health

Visit all Merchant locations

With all the boiler plate stuff out of the way, let's get to the fun ones: Exploration and Skill.

Exploration

Since it's such a large game, lets go through it from start and sample some interesting ideas from each section. I'll add comments to them if they need explaining/or have cleverly worded description text.

Chapter 1.1

A Sign of things to come - Jump out of the first house's second floor window

Temporary relief - Lock yourself in both "safehouse" by boarding up the door and windows. It'll buy some time.

Camper's Refuge - Climb up the bell tower. You can be a pansy, we won't blame you.

Sheet Shooting - Take out at least three Novistador in the Novistador Dome

Chapter 4.2

Take out one El Gigante with the trap door

Chapter 4.3 - Nothing too memorable.

...(I've sort of run out of steam at this point, so I'm going to call it quits for now)

Skill

In regards to "skill" based rewards, there's quite a lot of examples in terms of item usage crossed with the environments, here's a few examples:

Boom goes the dynamite - Shoot a village who's holding a dynamite, taking out two other villagers

Off you go - shoot a village off a plank falling to their death

GET OFF MY ROOF - kick a ladder off with a village onboard.

Bait and switch - Lure a villager into a bomb trap

Take down the El Gigante by stabbing it

Flashbang three Plagas at the same time

Defeat El Garrador with both bells intact

Defeat Verdugo without the Magnum or Rocket Launcher

Defeat both El Gigante in the Molten Room without firing a single shot

...

A staple of Resident Evil fans had be "special runs" - basically gameplay restrictions for the game. These would make very difficult challenges (not impossible) that would make these achievements a badge of merit, such as:

Knife Run - Knife only (except for when a knife is unavailable)

Pistol Run - Only Pistol type weapons can be used

No Health Upgrade Run - Cannot upgrade health for either characters

No death run - No deaths allowed

No Health Kit Run - Cannot heal either character for the entire game

All in a day's work - Finish the game within 8 hours (the timespan of the other game)

As you can see, there's plenty of room to be creative with such achievements, and there's definitely plenty of new ways to create additional replay interest in the game.

Others

A few games have featured two other minor categories of "achievements": Viral - a type of achievement that relies on players "infecting" others by communicating/competing against each other; and "Mark of Shame" - an achievement for something that players did that deserves shaming.

Fortunately in Resident Evil 4, we do have a perfect "Mark of Shame":

At the lake, shoot into it and have to lake monster eat you before the fight even begin.

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Well that about wraps it up on this long post. I believe this list barely scratches the surface of what can be achieved (I had realized I haven't played the game in a long time, and the last third of the game has been completely lost on me now), but I think this goes to show that a) Capcom really didn't try that hard at all with this, b) some achievements come fairly naturally from just playing the game, and c) being creative with the achievement process can potentially increase player's incentive try out and replay the game.